Mutually Inclusive PR

Without Inherent Excitement, Word of Mouth would Fizzle

When's the last time someone broke into the conversation because they couldn't wait to tell you about a nondescript product or service that met some of their needs in a generic sort of way?

Unless your friends are broke and have found something free that would normally cost hundreds of dollars, it's not likely.  People may be pleased when they find something that sort of meets their needs, but they don't get excited about it.

And excitement lies at the heart of generating word of mouth.

Software developer Eric Sink has an entertaining and enlightening piece about the need to narrow the focus of your product design so that it perfectly meets the needs of a group of people. Then you have potential for generating buzz, if buzz doesn't just bubble up by itself.

Designing something that sort of meets the needs of a huge group of people? Don't even think about word of mouth. And why are you even doing it in the first place?

Since I found the link to Eric's piece on Robert Scoble's blog, I'm officially declaring this Scoble Week on Mutually Inclusive PR.  Next week I promise to look further afield for topics...

Update:  I fixed the headline, which said "fizz' instead of "fizzle."

Tags: robertscoble, buzz, word of mouth, wom, promotion, excitement

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Design Flaw as Brand Experience

The first time I started our Xbox I couldn't believe the incredibly noisy start-up sound that emanated from the TV speakers.

Obviously, the design team never tried to catch a quick video game at 2 a.m., while everyone else is asleep.

It's designed to draw attention to the fact that you're about to play games instead of:

• > sleeping
• > doing chores
• > working, or
• > monitoring the reactor core.

Thanks, Microsoft, for such an annoying experience that I will always associate with your product.

Now, the company is planning to hard-code a start-up sound into the long-delayed Windows Vista operating system. Now even the geeks won't be able to disable that Windows trill, as they boot their laptops during a conference, meeting, phone call, symphony recoding session, or whatever.

On Scoble's blog, the decision is described as part of the Vista "brand experience."

Some design decisions are so anti-customer, it's hard to describe the stupidity behind them.

Tags: microsoft, mistakes, sound, branding, stupidity

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You Say Bad Design, I Say Not Overdesigned

Web seer Robert Scoble claims "ugly design" or "anti-marketing design" works well for web sites, because people have become suspicious of sites that look too well put together.  In a lot of ways, he's right.

Anyone who has been involved in direct marketing can tell you the most effective solicitation pieces aren't always the fanciest.  They're the ones that slip past people's defences long enough to have an impact.

Graphic designer and all-round publishing guru Robert MacDonald used to tell me that the pitch letters that worked best for him were two or three pages long, with lots of words underlined. By Scoble's standards, they would rate as anti-marketing pieces, because they were made to look and read like they came directly from the keyboard of the hard-working head of a non-profit organization who didn't have time for fancy page design.

However, Scoble's use of Google as an example of ugly design is off base.  It's a remarkably well-designed site, partly because they resist the temptation to load the site up with eye candy.

Pat McCarthy's advice is to focus on usability and search engine optimization first.

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1983 Gimli Plane Crash that Almost Happened

Imagine the surprise of two pilots who, in July 1983, without fuel, successfully brought a Boeing 767 to an emergency landing on an abandoned air force air strip. They found, not an empty runway, but a car race taking place in what was now a raceway.

Imagine the surprise of the pit crews and crowd as the huge jet dropped from the sky and rolled its way toward them, slowed by a partially-deployed front wheel.

This was the event for which most people know Gimli, Manitoba. It's a town about an hour's drive north of Winnipeg, where I spent a lot of weekends and summers as a kid. The Gimli Glider, as the  Air Canada plane was called, made international news for an air emergency that didn't end in disaster.

One of the factors that caused the plane to run out of fuel between Ottawa and Edmonton was the introduction of a new plane to the fleet and new metric standards, without timely training and manuals. After a fuel tank gauge malfunctioned, the maintenance crews and pilots had plenty of time to sort out what amount of fuel the plane needed for the flight, but they ended up using the wrong ratio to make their calculations

Two factors that saved lives were the experience pilot Robert Pearson had as a glider pilot, and the familiarity co-pilot Maurice Quintal had with the Gimli air strip, where he had been stationed with the Royal Canadian Air Force. When both engines stopped running and hydraulics were severely limited, Pearson improvised to get the plane down. At one point he realized he was going to almost overshoot the runway, so he used a gliding maneuvre called a sideslip to get the plane low enough to land at the start of the runway.

As for Gimli, the economic disaster predicted when the air base closed down never materialized. It's a trading centre for some of the Interlake region of Manitoba, and a tourism destination. The New Iceland Heritage Museum opened in 2000, profiling the area's history as a settlement for Icelandic immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Check out the CBC archives for a sound clip after the plane landed safely. For a description of the emergency landing, see Wade Nelson's article. For more on the metric conversion error that caused the problem, see Peter Banks' article.

The photo above was taken by Wayne Glowacki of the Winnipeg Free Press.

Previous post:

Air Crash: Language and Expectations

Thanks to Keizo Gates for the link.

Keep it Simple

We've had our new TV for five months now, and when we watch a DVD we still go through a complex procedure that involves changing TV channels, manually flipping through the TV's menu, and praying that some glitch hasn't invalidated our cumbersome but effective technique.

The TV comes with an instruction manual and a remote control that clearly has a button on it for switching to the DVD player. We continue to follow the luddite path of least resistance, because by trial and error that's the one that worked.

The same goes for several gadgets in the house that my technologically advanced children should be able to operate. But the usage is counter-intuitive enough for them to remain stumped for weeks or months. The instruction manual is somewhere around, but wasn't the purpose of buying a gadget to simplify your life, not bog you down in poorly written tech speak that seems to have been run though an automatic translator?

We want our technology to be easy to use. We want it to simplify our lives, not make them more complex and stressful.

Fast Company takes a look at the balancing act at Google, where the extremely complex technology behind the search engine and other functions is sheathed in a strikingly simple design that eschews eye candy in favour of white space and text, ranked in a useful order.

As is typical with clean design, it's not as easy as it looks. But it's worth it. I gave up the news portal concept at Yahoo! years ago, because the customization I could achieve wasn't worth the assault on my eyes and my attention every time I wanted to do a search. I still seek out news, but I try to find portals that are designed for the reader more than the advertiser.

When someone comes to your web site, do they immediately understand the key functions it offers, and the key services you provide? Does it provide a shortcut to the kind of transaction or information exchange the visitor is likely to be looking for? Have you made that first handshake with you as simple and functional as possible?

Look again and think simple. Not necessarily Google simple. But a simple that is appropriate for your site.

Thanks to Judy Gombita for the regular tips, this one about the Fast Company item by Linda Tischler.

Blogpulse tracks the conversations about the article.

Man Bites Dog, Takes Public Transportation

  Pretend Passengers 
  Originally uploaded by hyku.

Josh Hallett blogged about his experience on the public transportation system in his part of Florida.

The fact that taking a few buses for a day merits a detailed examination of the experience says something about our dependence on the car (or SUV, or minivan, or pickup truck).

I've spent a few years busing it to university and work, riding my bike and walking. But the majority of my school and work life has involved a vehicle, usually driven solo.

Hallett's experience is not surprising. Trying to fit his consulting travel around the transit system resulted in hours of unbillable time spent waiting in bus depots. Most public transit systems are designed to move large numbers of people during rush hour from the suburbs to downtown, or to industrial parks and college campuses. Movement from one suburb to another is sometimes easy, but often it involves a circuitous route. Setting up meetings, then trying to force fit the transit timetable to match your schedule will usually result in wasted time, which Hallett admits when he writes up his experiment.

In the end, a collision involving the bus he was waiting for caused him to miss his connection, which set off a chain reaction of delays. The result was a four hour bus ride home that would have take about 35 25 minutes by car. (See all of Hallett's postings about his experiment.)

(The "Joshworthy" category this is listed under is an inside joke. See the posting and comments on Hallett's Hyku Blog.)

Consumer Guide to Bypassing Phone Tree Hell

Now here's something I'd like to see for Canadian companies. Steve Rubel and Shel Holtz mentioned a web site that gives people tips on how to opt out of an IVR phone system and talk to a real person.

A lot of people have gotten into the habit of dialing 0 when they want to bypass the automated phone system. To combat this impulse, more and more companies are creating complicated opt-out methods.

Enter Paul English, whose IVR Cheat Sheet is a brilliant move of customer activism in the face of annoying technology.

If companies didn't go to such lengths to make it difficult to contact a human being, there would be no need for the Cheat Sheet.

Google News Map Visualizes Online News Popularity

I've been blissfully unaware of Newsmap, a web-based tool that presents Google News in a visual way, similar to a tag cloud.

Given that Google is purposefully very text-based and very black-text-on-white-background, the map is an interesting tool.

It assigns greater visual size for news items that are popular in the past day.

Marcos Weskamp, a designer in Tokyo who created Newsmap describes it:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and  the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

Thanks to Dan Misener for the link.

Fewer Dogs Wagging Tails Makes Easier Reading

Dave Taylor argues in The Intuitive Life Business Blog that writers should be able to impose their formating preferences on the publications they write for. Hah! I wish him well on his campaign.

After the editors get finished forwarding his impassioned pleas to their friends and co-workers, with caustic comments attached, they'll go for drinks with each other and shudder at the prospect of each story in a magazine having its own unique visual style.

Taylor is completely right that some things in this world are designed by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Magazines and newspapers, on the other hand, tend to be designed by professional designers, to improve the reading experience for us, the readers.

When Taylor recently submitted an article to a magazine, he was appalled to find that his text formating was being removed by their composition system.

What Taylor sees as the tail wagging the dog (he's the writer, so he's the dog), is actually a case of the dog (the editors are in charge of the content of the publication) wagging the tail (the writer, who is commissioned to write something that will be edited and formatted to fit the writing style and visual guidelines for the publication).

Dave wants a particular word to be bolded?  Fine, as long as it's on his blog, where he's the dog. If publications altered their style guidelines for each different writer, guess what? They wouldn't have a consistent style, and readers would hate it.

If readers are used to a newspaper or web site bolding company names, what are they going to think when Dave decides to bold a quote form a source. Is the quote a company name, the reader is wondering. Variations from the publication's style create confusion, which may make the writer feel good, but it doesn't encourage the reader to renew their subscription.

Taylor's right, the dog should wag the tail. He just needs to realize that when his writing appears in a publication that has a style its readers are used to, he's the tail, not the dog.

Keep Tags Simple

The lesson to be learned from IABC's choice of a four word lengthy tag for tracking postings and photos seems to be: if it isn't simple, it won't work.

All the tagged items so far on Technorati are from IABC's own blog. No one else who's blogging of posting photos about the IABC international conference being held in Washington D.C. have been able to figure out how to make their tags match the one IABC suggests.

Compare that to the technology conference Gnomedex, which had hundreds of tagged postings, and you can see that simplicity pays.

(Tags are way to identify a web page with information on a topic that others might find relevant.  On Technorati, you can view postings and photos with a common tag, and you can browse around different tags.)

Update: Chris Hall, the web guy handling IABC's blog, suggests I might be nitpicking to worry about whether Technorati tags are functioning the way they're intended. He also suggests I not assume the problem lies with IABC the next time anything doesn't appear to be working.

Fair enough. Any technorati tags about the IABC conference that used all four words in sequence showed up fine if you searched for all four words. And anyone who was guessing at the possible word combination to use as a tag still had a good likelihood of successfully searching for postings if they used "iabc conference" or some similar search that used a couple of the words from the four-word tag.

I still think any tag that uses four words is probably too long for the kind of use proposed.  But I'm probably nitpicking.  ;-)

Tag: IABC International Conference 2005